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Gore Vidal was always warning us that the barbarians were at the gates, but whether or not his passing means that he escaped ahead of them is still open to debate.

The 86 year-old author, essayist, commentator and all-around gadfly who died on July 31 at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications related to pneumonia, was a patrician wordsmith who championed the cause of the iconoclasts and misfits of our society, defending them against what he viewed as the destructive forces of conventional morality.

From his early scandalous novel about gay love, The City and the Pillar, through his revisionist study of the often maligned former vice-president Aaron Burr, in his novel Burr, and his best-selling fictional memoir of a Hollywood trans-sexual, Myra Breckenridge, Vidal always managed to be outrageous, successful and thought-provoking at the same time.

He was born at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. in 1925, the son of a military mandarin who rose to the top of the aeronautics world and a prominent socialite mother who dabbled in both politics and theatre, a path her son would also follow.

Vidal emerged early as a writer at the age of 19, with a critically-acclaimed debut novel about World War II called Williwaw and never looked back, amassing nearly 30 volumes of non-fiction, 25 novels, 15 screenplays and 6 plays.

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While it may have been Vidal’s fiction that made him most popular in his lifetime, it’s his plays that actually offer some of the clearer insights into what the man really thought.

It’s also revealing that of all the 70 works he penned, the only one that’s currently in the public eye is his 1960 script for The Best Man, coming to the close of a successful Broadway revival on Sept. 9.

The play, set during the political convention during which one of the two major American parties will nominate their next candidate, reveals his jaundiced view of the electoral process, which he came by honestly.

His grandfather was a veteran Democratic senator from Oklahoma, Vidal grew up in Washington D.C. and his mother was heavily involved in politics. He would later unsuccessfully run for congress in New York in 1960 (the year The Best Man was first produced) and then challenge Jerry Brown for the gubernatorial nomination in California in 1982.

Everyone wondered who Vidal was actually knifing when he wrote The Best Man and the best guesses at the time were that Adlai Stevenson was the ineffectual but sincere, liberal, Richard Nixon was the duplicitous, but psychologically scarred, conservative and Harry S. Truman was the boisterous, life-affirming former president. (A role, by the way, being played to great acclaim by James Earl Jones in the current revival.)

While some critics in 2012 felt that parts of Vidal’s view of the political scene were dated, there are other moments in the play that still ring true, in particular his fears about a world where the barbarians of consensus would overrun the simple sincere believers:

“The world’s changed since I was politickin’,” says the former president. “In those days you had to pour God over everything, like ketchup.”

Those days seem to have returned.

And it’s hard not hear the ring of contemporary truth when Vidal has his hero comment that “Life is not a popularity contest; neither is politics. The important thing for any government is educating the people about the issues, not following the ups and downs of popular opinion.”

It didn’t matter whether Vidal was writing about Martians infiltrating middle America (1955’s Visit to a Small Planet, which eerily anticipates by 3rd Rock from the Sun by 40 years!), the last Roman emperor holding on against the tide of advancing Visigoths (1966’s Romulus, based on a play by Friederich Durrenmatt), or An Evening with Richard Nixon (which skewered the president on Broadway in 1972, months before the Watergate break-in even occurred), he always felt that his beloved country was under attack and only he could tell the good guys from the bad guys.

But in his final years, Vidal’s usually devastatingly accurate political compass went askew and he seemingly went over to the side of the barbarians he had fought against so long, by hailing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as “a noble boy,” a relationship under examination in a play called Terre Haute, coming to this year’s Summerworks Festival in Toronto.

Perhaps it’s better to look at the sum of a long and eloquently lived life, where he wrote his own epitaph years ago, with more elegance and eloquence than anyone else could ever summon up.

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

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